"...one of the things you'll learn is that it's all real.
Every word of every novel is real,every frame of every movie, every panel of every
comic strip."-The Doctor, The Gallifrey Chronicles

The Complete Adventures

Doctor Who fans have been known to argue incessantly over what constitutes
"canonical" Doctor Who. Generally everyone agrees that this
encompasses the original tv series. Most would include the Paul McGann movie (although
that wasn't always the case). And the current series is pretty much a given. But what's
the status of things like Dimensions in Time? What about the novel range that
spun off from the tv movie? And if we include the novels, why not the short story
collections that Virgin and the BBC published? And in that case, why shouldn't we include
the short stories from the Doctor Who Annuals? Where is the arbitrary line to be
drawn?

Quite simply, I don't believe that there can be an easy answer to that question. Fandom
has expended a lot of energy in an attempt to define a "canon", but there's never
been any agreement, not even a broad consensus. (Someone will always want to include or
exclude something that no one else does!) So I decided not
to worry about it, and devised "The Complete Adventures" instead. What started
life as a simple, boring list of the tv episodes (the same as you'd find on any other
Doctor Who site) turned into something much more interesting. My basic rule of thumb
was to treat every story equally, regardless of its source. Why, I asked myself, should we
regard an annual story as somehow less real than a Missing Adventure novel? The former,
written by an hack author with little concern for the overall continuity of the
show, just working to complete his commission and move on to his next project,
is probably a damned sight more "traditional" Doctor Who than
a novel written by a fan author and scrupulously cross-referenced to the series
continuity. We should also remember that for the Doctor Who fan
growing up in the sixties and seventies, before the continuity police
took over, those comic strips and annual stories were just as much a part
of the series as the television episodes - and indeed more accessible than
a once-only tv broadcast - and just as eagerly devoured.
So who are we to suddenly declare that they no longer exist?

So the task I set myself was to fit every story together into one big picture - and where necessary,
invent some explanations for the contradictions that inevitably occur.

In order to fit all these disparate stories together, it's occasionally been
necessary to make a few assumptions - the additional notes
attached to certain stories will explain the more outrageous ones. If a
story does not feature the current TV companions, for instance, then we
must just accept that those characters are taking a short break from
travelling in the Tardis for the duration of said adventure - they may
just be aboard the ship asleep. (The comic strips are the chief
culprits here.) And speaking of comic strips, I've made no attempt to
explain changes in the Doctor's character and personality.

The Complete Adventures

Sometimes though, no amount of mind-bending and bonkers theorizing
is enough to fit some of these stories into the ongoing continuity -
but I refuse to admit defeat. They appear in an additional listing
in the spin-offs section - these could be considered tales set in
alternative universes if you want to worry about such a silly concept
as canon - I prefer to see them as fantastic expressions of the
wonderful diversity of Doctor Who.

Look out for this symbol. It
means there are some additional annotations on a particularly thorny continuity issue.
Click on the question mark, and you'll be taken to the relevant page for more in-depth
analysis. However, for reasons of conciseness and clarity of layout, I won't give minutely
detailed explanations for my placements of each and every story. (My maths lecturers
would hate that - they always told me to show my working!) Because of this, you might
like to check out my Blog,
where I'll be pontificating on the finer points of continuity theory; and
The
Complete Adventures Facebook group, where you can discuss the site and the decisions
I've made in the story listings.

Even though I've expended a lot of thought on this, it's important to
remember that it's all just a bit of fun. There's no way that all these
stories can fit together - they're just too contradictory, and they never
were meant to be part of a whole! Anyway, it's quite clear that the Doctor's
past history keeps changing - so at any point in his life, only some
of his past adventures might actually have happened to him. This is the
basis of the quantum universe that I believe Doctor Who inhabits.
As a result, I'm not too fussed about reconciling every last detail. Some
continuity buffs go into excessive and anal detail, trying to analyse and account
for every single obscure factoid and throwaway line of dialogue. To me, it's
important only that each adventure fits somewhere logical in the overall sequence.
What I'm creating here is, for me, a creative exercise in itself - taking various,
disparate tales as the pieces in a narrative jigsaw puzzle, and putting them into
a sequence that feels aesthetically right to me - rather than placing everything under
microscopic examination. I'd rather go with the feel and the flow that appeals to me,
than try to account forensically for every single detail.

Nevertheless, it was important to impose a few rules on myself - firstly,
to list each story only once - in the case of multi-Doctor stories, this usually
means placing it within the chronology of its most recent Doctor. This is certainly
how such adventures were presented on the television (The Three Doctors as a
Pertwee story, The Five Doctors a Davison adventure, etc.) The explanatory
notes contain detailed cross-referenced links back to the previous Doctors'
listings, where a footnote records the adventure's existence. There have to be
exceptions to every rule of course, so Cold Fusion is listed as a Davison
adventure, which is how the book was presented.

I have avoided trying to list unseen adventures (the Doctor's previous
visits to certain planets or meetings with historical figures) save when they
have some relevance to the plot - the Doctor's first encounter with Xoanon for
instance, which sets up the events of The Face of Evil.

Basically I have tried to include every officially licensed story featurng the
Doctor - every novel, comic strip, film, stage play, short
story, etc. Purely for information purposes, I've also listed some stories showing the
further exploits of the Doctor's companions, with an aim to showing roughly where they
might fit in with the Doctor's timeline (as much as you can fit in anything with a time
traveller). But I should stress that these are not exhaustive or complete listings - it's
only the Doctor's life I'm interested in. So in a lot of cases, these are partial or truncated
lists. I've included the Gallifrey and UNIT series, and the various adventures of Sarah Jane Smith.
I've done a very selective listing for Torchwood, mostly to demonstrate how Captain Jack flitted in
and out of the Doctor's adventures, but I drew the line after his final cameo appearance in Doctor
Who. I've also done a partial list for the Virgin New Adventures featuring the further
adventures of Bernice Summerfield, because I felt these followed on from the original Doctor Who
novel range and tied up some story threads. But again, I drew the line before the range of Bernice books
and audio plays from Big Finish started. (Of course, stories where Benny actually appears with the Doctor
will be listed as usual.)

The Complete Adventures

I haven't included any fan fiction
here either - not even my own Bullseye
Books series gets a look-in - since I decided to concentrate solely
on professionally produced stories. In a similar
vein, I've been inclined to exclude the plethora of charity anthologies that have
shown up over the years - the involvement of professional authors may have
tended to blur the distinction somewhat, but ultimately these are still fanzines, not
generally available to the public. After including Campaign and a small number
of stories from the first Perfect Timing collection (some of which were useful in
plugging narrative gaps - again it goes back to the conceit of the site as being a
creative exercise in itself) - I made the decision to draw a line there.

I am only including stories about the Doctor and his companions (within those limits
detailed earlier) - which means that more peripheral tales are not listed. So, stories
that exclusively feature the Daleks and other monsters or supporting characters have
not been mentioned, even when they are later referenced in the Doctor's adventures.
(For instance, characters such as Sara Kingdom, Abslom Daak and Kroton the Cyberman
appeared in their own comic strips long before they turned up in the Doctor's adventures.
By way of a more obscure example, a supporting character called Gaylord Lefevre in the
novel Divided Loyalties actually first encountered the Celestial Toymaker in the
Doctorless comic strip The Greatest Gamble - and there's plenty of this cross-fertilization
across the various media if you know where to look for it.) Iris Wildthyme, the Paternoster Gang,
Jago & Litefoot, Counter Measures, Graceless, Vienna, Faction Paradox, Charley Pollard,
the young Lethbridge-Stewart novels, the Australian K-9 series, Class - none of these
are here. (But then again, these are my rules, and I can change them as I go along! So
Mission to the Unknown is listed, even though it's technically a Dalek solo adventure
- because its position within the ongoing plot of the tv series made it hard to leave out.)
But let me stress, just as this isn't a collector's guide to all fiction set within the Doctor Who
universe, nor perhaps should it be seen as a suggested viewing/reading/listening order. This is my attempt
to map out the course of the Doctor's life from the materials available.

A new TV series began in 2005, and new Doctor Who adventures are being produced
all the time in other media. The list currently contains 3512 stories of the Doctor, and is continually
expanding... As a result, this site is in a constant state of flux. I strive to keep the
listings as up-to-date as possible. You can keep track of updates, changes and revisions
through the site's
Facebook page. (Come and "Like" it!) Regular
visitors will notice that the listings sometimes change, as a new adventure
sheds a different light on the placing of an older story - or sometimes just
because I change my mind. For instance, the placing of the thirteenth Doctor's
ongoing adventures may initially seem somewhat arbitrary, until we have enough stories
to make some considered judgements...

In the listings tables, each entry is colour-coded by type, which
works like this:

The TV episodes

The novels

The comic strips

The short stories

The audio adventures - including radio plays, talking
books, etc.

Interactive material - video games, gamebooks, etc.

Live performances

Additional video - including webcasts, DVD extras, etc.

A few oddities - things that don't really
fit into the categories above.